264 Rev. Dr. Watt on the different Kinds of Cuneiform Writing 
spoken a different tongue from that of the nobleman with whom he associated ? 
Or, for a moment allowing this possible, how, of two contemporary dialects, could 
the provincial one be more refined and systematized than that used at court ? 
The supposition, then, by which it is endeavoured to maintain the genuineness 
of the Zend- Avesta, is directly at variance both with the history of its reputed 
author and with the internal evidence of the case, arising from a comparison of 
the Zend-Avesta with the language of the inscriptions in question; and, in all 
probability, this compilation was not fabricated by the Parsis till above a thousand 
years after the age in which the founder of their sect is imagined to have lived. 
6. With regard to the alphabet employed in the kind of writing under con- 
sideration, I shall commence with remarking that it is not an original one, as 
may, even without appealing to the proofs bearing on the general question of the 
origin of letters, be shown from the retention in it of signs syllabically used in 
company with the elements of a superior system; or from,—what comes nearly 
to the same thing,—the frequent omission of vowel letters in the words written 
therewith. For, supposing for a moment that the Persians had arrived at*the 
three classes of phonetic signs of which this alphabet is composed, by means of 
their own efforts of investigation, without any external aid, they must at all 
events have so far understood the nature of their own invention, as to perceive 
the great advantage, in clearness and precision, of expressing syllabic sounds by 
consonants combined with vowel-letters, rather than by single signs. They, con- 
sequently, would have abandoned the last-mentioned class, uniformly employing 
both of the former ones in the denotation of syllables; and the circumstance of 
their having failed to do so renders it quite evident that they derived their system 
from imperfect observation of some superior one, to the consonants of which, as 
being the class most difficult to apprehend, they occasionally attached, not their 
proper, but syllabic values. And as this alphabet is not original in reference to 
any class of the powers of its letters, so neither is it in regard to their shapes. 
Some of them are obviously derived from exactly similar combinations of wedges 
in the second and third kinds of cuneiform writing; and as for the rest, surely 
such complicated characters, consisting of so many and such various separate 
ingredients, could not have been, in the first instance, applied to expressing the 
simple elements of articulate sounds; it is, indeed, quite inconceivable that they 
could. But, suppose them to have been antecedently employed for a length of 
